Sword Art Online Volume 5

It was a Procyon SL, an optical gun from Gun Gale Online. Despite being categorized as a handgun, it featured a full-auto mode, which made it very popular as a sidearm when fighting monsters. Sinon had the original thing in her storage room back in Glocken, but Shino had not bought this physical copy for herself. It wasn’t even sold in stores. It came a few days after she placed twenty-second in the Bullet of Bullets two months ago. Shino received an in-game message from Zaskar, the company that ran GGO, all in English. Once she had figured out what it said, she found that they were giving her the choice of either an in-game prize or a real model of a Procyon SL as her reward for placing in the BoB. She immediately made up her mind to go for the game money, having no desire for a lifelike toy gun to show up in the mail. But then she gave it a second thought. If she was going to be sure that the drastic measures she was taking in GGO to heal her trauma were working, she’d have to touch an actual model gun in reality. But visiting a toy store to get one was too big of a mental hurdle. She was sure Kyouji would happily lend her one, but the potential that she might start convulsing the moment he handed it to her made her think better of that idea. Buying one online was the most realistic option, but even looking at pictures of guns on a site made her queasy and prevented her from going through with it. To say nothing of the monetary cost. If the company behind GGO was going to send her a model gun for free, that solved all of her issues—and after agonizing over the decision until she was ready to burst, she decided on the real prize over the virtual one. One week later, a heavy EMS package arrived at her door. It took another two weeks for her to work up the courage to open it. But the reaction she had at the moment of truth betrayed her hopes. Shino shut the thing in the back of her desk drawer and consigned it to a dusty corner of her memory. Now, Shino had finally picked up the Procyon again.

The chill of the gun snuck through her palm into her bicep, through her shoulder and into the center of her body. For being a resin model, it was unbelievably heavy. The handgun that Sinon would have spun around with her fingertips seemed to be shackled to the ground in Shino’s hands. As the warmth was sucked out of her palm, the gun began to heat up. Once it was lukewarm and clammy with her sweat, that warmth seemed to belong to someone else. Who? It was…his. Her pulse quickened beyond the point of control, and the freezing blood raced and rushed through her entire body. Her sense of orientation faded. The floor beneath her feet tilted, lost firmness. But Shino could not take her eyes off the dark gleam of the gun. She gazed into it at point-blank range. Her ears rang. Eventually the sound evolved into a high-pitched scream. A scream of pure terror from a young girl. Who was screaming? It was…me. Shino didn’t know her father’s face. That didn’t mean that she had no memory of her father in real life. It meant that, in literal terms, she had never seen her father, even in photographs or videos. He died in a traffic accident when Shino was not yet two years old. Shino’s parents were driving on an old two-lane road on the side of a mountain near the prefecture border in northeast Japan, on their way to spend the end of the year with her mother’s parents. They’d left Tokyo late, and it was past eleven o’clock when it happened. The cause of the accident was a truck making a turn that, based on the tire marks left behind, put it over the line into the other lane. The truck’s driver smashed through the windshield and was essentially DOI when he hit the

street. Their compact automobile, impacted directly on the right side by the truck, went over the guardrail and down the slope, where it was stopped by two trees. Her father was unconscious from heavy injuries in the driver’s seat, but had not died immediately. In the passenger seat, her mother only suffered a broken left femur. Strapped into a child seat in the back, Shino was virtually unharmed. She didn’t have a single memory of this event. Unluckily, the road was barely even used by the locals, and it was totally empty late at night. Even worse, the impact of the crash had destroyed their phone. Early the next morning, a passing driver noticed the accident and called it in, six hours after it happened. The entire time, Shino’s mother could do nothing but watch as her husband died of internal bleeding and went cold. Something in the deepest part of her heart was irrevocably broken. After the accident, her mother’s life had essentially been rewound to before she’d met Shino’s father. The two of them left their home in Tokyo and moved in with Shino’s grandparents. Her mother destroyed all the remnants of her father’s memory, including photographs and videos. She never talked about her memories of him again. After that, she tried to live like a country girl, seeking only peace and tranquility. Even now, fifteen years after the accident, Shino didn’t know exactly how her mother viewed her. It often seemed to be more like a little sister than anything, but fortunately for Shino, her mother never showed her anything but deep love. She remembered story time and lullabies before bed. So in Shino’s memory, her mother was always a fragile girl who was easily hurt. Naturally, as she grew older, Shino began to realize that she needed to be strong. It was her job to protect her mother. Once, when her grandparents were out, a persistent door-to-door salesman camped out at the front door and frightened her mother. Nine years old at the time, Shino warned that she’d call the police to drive him off.

To Shino, the outside world was a place full of dangerous things that threatened her quiet life with her mother. All she knew was that it was her job to watch out for them. So in a way, Shino felt it was inevitable that the incident happened to them. That the outside world she’d tried so hard to stay away from struck back with a vengeance. At age eleven and in the fifth grade, Shino was not a child who played outside. She came straight home from school and read the books she borrowed from the library. Her grades were good, but she had few friends. She was extremely sensitive to interference from outside sources—she once gave a boy a bloody nose for the harmless prank of hiding her school shoes. It happened on a Saturday afternoon right at the start of the second semester. Shino and her mother walked to the local post office together. There were no other customers there. While her mother was producing forms at the window, Shino sat down on a bench in the lobby, legs dangling, to read the book she brought along. She didn’t remember the name of the book. She heard the door creak and looked up to see a man enter the building. He was skinny and middle-aged, dressed in grayish clothing and holding a Boston bag in one hand. The man stopped in the entrance and looked around the office. For an instant, his eyes met Shino’s. The color of his eyes struck her as strange. The whites were yellowed, and his irises were like deep black holes, restlessly moving. Now that she was older, she realized his pupils were probably in extreme dilation. Later they would learn that he’d injected himself with stimulants before entering the post office. Before Shino had time to be suspicious, he quickly walked to the desk, where Shino’s mother was conducting business at the transfer and savings window. He grabbed her right arm and tugged it, then shoved with his other hand. Her mother fell down without a sound, her eyes wide with shock. Shino jumped to her feet, about to give the man a piece of her mind for the cruel violence he’d committed on her beloved mother.

The man put the bag on the counter and pulled out something black from within. She didn’t realize it was a gun until he pointed it at the man behind the window. A pistol—toy—no, real—robbery?! The words flashed through Shino’s mind. “Fill the bag with money!” he demanded in a raspy voice. “Both hands on top of the desk! No pressing the alarm button! Nobody move!!” He waved the gun back and forth, warning the employees in the back of the station. Shino considered running out of the building and calling for help somehow. But she couldn’t do that with her mother collapsed on the ground like that. She hesitated long enough for the man to shout, “Put the money in the bag! Everything you’ve got!! Do it now!!” The employee at the window grimaced in fear, but held out a two-inch-thick stack of bills, when— The air in the building seemed to expand for an instant. Shino’s ears throbbed, and it took some time before she realized that it was caused by a high-pitched blast. Next, something clinked quietly off the wall and rolled toward her feet. It was a narrow, golden metal tube. She looked up again to see the employee behind the counter clutching his chest, his eyes wide with shock. There was a small red stain on his white shirt, just below the tie. No sooner had she processed this information than the employee fell backward in his chair, pulling down a cabinet of documents with him. “I told you not to press the button!” the man screeched. The gun was trembling in his hand. A smell like fireworks reached her nose. “Hey, you! Get over here and pack the money in!” He pointed the gun at two female employees who were frozen in terror. “Do it now!” he screamed, but the women just shook their heads in tight motions and did not move. They’d probably been trained on what to do in such an emergency, but no manual protected the human body against real bullets.

The man kicked the wall beneath the counter several times in irritation, then raised his arm again, preparing to shoot another person. The women screamed and ducked down. But then he spun his body and pointed the gun into the customer area. “Do it quick, or I’ll shoot someone else! I’ll do it, don’t test me!!” He was pointing at Shino’s mother on the ground, her eyes staring into space without focus. The unfolding disaster around her was overloading her mother’s ability to cope. Shino instantly understood what she had to do. I have to protect Mom. It was that belief, that force of will that had been with her since she was a child, that drove her body to action. She threw the book aside and leaped onto the man’s right wrist—where he was carrying the gun—and bit down hard. Her sharp little baby teeth easily locked into his tendon. “Aaah!” He screamed in shock and tried to shake her off. Shino’s body hit the side of the counter and two of her baby teeth fell out, but she didn’t notice. The black gun fell out of the man’s hand in the chaos. She scrambled to pick it up, all other thoughts lost. It was heavy. The weight of metal, pulling down on both of her little arms. The vertically lined grip was slick with the sweat of the man’s palm, and his residual warmth made it feel like a living thing. Shino was old enough to know what the tool was for. If she used it, she could stop that terrible man. Guided by this line of thought, she held up the gun the way she’d seen, putting her pointer fingers on the trigger, and pointed it at him. He leaped onto Shino with a screech and grabbed her wrists, hoping to pull the gun right out of her hands.

Even now, she didn’t know if this was a good thing or a bad thing for her. But it was plain truth that the man’s grip on the gun pointed toward him actually aided her shot. After the fact, Shino learned more than enough information about The Gun— the one the man had used in his attempted robbery. In 1933, over ninety years ago, the Soviet Army produced a gun called the Tokarev TT-33. Eventually the Chinese copied the design as the Type 54, also known as the Black Star. That was the name of The Gun. It used 7.62 × 25 mm tungsten bullets. This was a smaller-bore weapon than the more popular 9 mm handguns, but it had better firepower. The initial velocity of its bullets was supersonic, and the gun had the greatest penetrating power of anything its size. This meant it had tremendous recoil, and in the early 1950s, the Soviets phased it out for the newer, more compact 9 mm Makarov. This was not a gun that an eleven-year-old child could operate with any ability. But because the man was clutching her wrists, and Shino realized he was going to take the gun away, her fingers tensed, and automatically pulled the trigger. An overwhelming shock ran through her hands to her elbows and shoulders, but all of the vibration that should have jolted the gun askance went straight into the man’s wrists instead. The air pulsed with heat again. He made a hiccupping sound and let go of Shino, stumbling back a few steps. A dark red circle was expanding rapidly around the stomach of his gray patterned shirt. “Aaa…aaaaah!!” He held his gut with both hands. She must have hit a big artery, because a stream of blood escaped through his fingers. But the man did not collapse. Because the full metal jackets the Black Star used were powerful enough to pass through the human body instantly, they were low on stopping power.

He screamed and reached out for Shino with his bloodied hands. The blood spatter from his gunshot wound sprinkled onto her. Her hands trembled and quaked, and she pulled the trigger again. This time, the gun rocketed in her hands, sending a jolt of pain through her elbows and shoulders. Her whole body shot backward and hit the counter, knocking the breath from her lungs. She didn’t even register the sound of the shot. The second bullet hit the man below his right collarbone, passed through him, and hit the wall behind his back. He stumbled, slipped on his blood, and fell to the linoleum floor. “Gaaahh!!” But he did not stop moving. Bellowing with rage, he tried to push himself up. Shino was in a state of terror. She knew if she didn’t stop him for good this time, he would absolutely kill her and her mother both. Ignoring the pain that threatened to tear her arms off her shoulders, she took two steps forward and pointed the gun right at the middle of the man’s body, which he had raised eight inches off the ground. The third shot dislocated her shoulder. This time there was nothing at all to stop the force of the recoil. Shino fell backward onto the floor. She did not let go of the gun. The third bullet, once again shot wildly off the mark, traveled several inches higher than she aimed. It hit the man right in the center of his face. His head struck the floor with a thud. He no longer moved or bellowed. Shino scrambled up to ensure that the attacker was finally immobile. I protected her. That was her first thought. She had successfully saved her mother. Shino looked over at the woman, still lying on the floor a few yards away. And in the eyes of her mother, the one person she loved more than any other in the

world… She saw undeniable fear directed at an undeniable target: Shino herself. Shino looked down at her own hands, still tightly squeezed around the grip of the handgun. They were covered with dark red droplets. Her mouth opened, and at last Shino let out a terrible wail. “Aaaahh!!” The shrill cry ripped its way out of her throat. Shino continued to stare at the Procyon SL in her hands. The skin from the backs of her hands to the bits between her fingers was slick and dripping with blood. She blinked several times, but it did not disappear. Drip, drip, drip, the viscous fluid fell to her feet. Suddenly, liquid burst out of both her eyes. Her vision clouded and swam, covering the black shine of the model gun. Within the darkness, she saw his face. The third bullet erupted from the gun and toward his face. Even after hitting him, the mark was surprisingly small, like a little bruise. But immediately after that, a red mist burst from the back of his head. The expression and life disappeared from his face. Somehow, just his left eye moved, that bottomless hole of a pupil staring at Shino. Right into her eyes. “Ah…ah…” Her tongue covered the back of her throat, blocking her breath. As if from a distance, she felt her stomach contract violently. Shino gritted her teeth and summoned every ounce of her concentration to throw the Procyon to the ground, then rushed toward the kitchen on unsteady feet and scrabbled at the knob to the bathroom, her palm slick with sweat. As soon as she’d lifted the toilet lid and bent over, hot bile surged up from her stomach. She tensed and clutched, vomiting over and over until it felt like everything in her body had been expelled.

When her stomach had finally stopped contracting, Shino was completely exhausted. She lifted her left hand and hit the flush knob. With great difficulty, she got to her feet, removed her glasses, and scrubbed her hands and face over and over with the bitingly cold water from the sink. She finished by rinsing out her mouth and drying her face with a clean towel from the cabinet. Her mental faculties were completely shut down. With tottering footsteps, she returned to her room. Doing her best not to look at it directly, she used the towel to cover up the model gun on the floor, then picked it up within the fabric and quickly hurled it back into the rear of the desk drawer. Once the drawer had snapped cleanly shut, she flopped face-first onto the bed, mentally and physically spent. The droplets of water from her wet hair mingled with the tears on her cheeks and stained her blanket. Eventually she realized that she was muttering the same things over and over in a tiny voice. “Help me…someone…help me…help me…someone…” Her memories of the next few days after the incident were unclear. Some adults wearing dark blue uniforms carefully, nervously told her to give them the gun, but her fingers were too stiff for them to pry it free. Many spinning red lights. Yellow tape waving in the wind. Blinding white light that forced her to shade her eyes. Only when she was being loaded into the police car did she recognize the pain in her right shoulder, and when she hesitantly brought it up, the officer quickly had her transferred to an ambulance. All these things existed in her head as vague, broken fragments of memory. In her hospital bed, two police ladies asked her about the incident over and over. She told them how much she wanted to see her mother, but it wasn’t until much, much later that her wish was granted. Shino was let out of the hospital after three days to her grandparents’ home, but her mother’s hospital stay lasted for over a month. The peaceful life they had before the incident never returned.

The media companies avoided reporting on the details of the case, following their own guidelines. The attempted armed robbery ended with the death of the suspected robber, with no additional public details. But it was a small rural town. The events that occurred within the post office all made it into the open —often with embellishments attached. The tale spread around the town like wildfire. For the last year and a half of elementary school, Shino was showered with every possible derivation of the word murderer. By the time she reached middle school, that harassment had evolved into pure exclusion from her peers. But to Shino, the gazes from others weren’t really the problem. She had never had any interest in being part of a group, even when she was younger. The problem was the claw marks the incident left upon her psyche. As the years passed, they showed no signs of fading. They tormented her. Every time Shino saw something categorized as a gun, the memories of the incident flooded back into her mind, vivid and terrible, plunging her into a state of shock. Hyperventilation, paralysis, disorientation, vomiting, even fainting. These spasms could easily happen, not just from seeing simple toy guns, but even images on TV. Because of that, Shino stopped watching virtually every kind of TV drama or movie. She suffered several fits because of educational videos in social studies class. The only relatively safe territory for her was literature—particularly the classics of old. Most of her middle school career was spent in a dusty corner of the library flipping through huge hardcover compendiums. Once middle school was done, she begged her grandparents to let her move somewhere else to work. When that got her nowhere, she came up with a backup plan—going to a high school in the Tokyo neighborhood where Shino had lived with her parents as a baby. She wanted to be in a place without the rumors and fascinated stares, of course, but more importantly, she knew she would never recover from her trauma if she lived in that town for the rest of her life. Naturally, Shino’s symptoms were diagnosed as a typical case of PTSD, and over the last four years, she’d seen countless therapists and counselors. She

took their medications obediently. But all of those doctors with their oddly similar smiles could only brush and stir the top layer of her heart, and none of them reached the place where the scars lay. As she sat in their pristine examination rooms, listening to them assure her that they understood how hard it was, she could only repeat the same refrain to herself. You understand? Have you ever killed someone with a gun before? At this point in time, she regretted that attitude and realized that it certainly hadn’t helped her connect with them and advance her treatment. But it still formed the core of her belief. Shino’s true wish was probably for them to decide once and for all if her actions were good or evil. But none of those doctors could have told her that. No matter how badly her memories and spasms haunted her, however, she never once thought about taking her own life. She had no regrets about pulling the trigger with the gun pointed at that man. Shino had no other choice from the moment he’d pointed it at her mother. If she was put back into that moment again, she would do the exact same thing. But she believed that if she sought the escape of suicide, it wouldn’t be fair to the man she killed. So she had to be strong. She wanted the kind of strength that would make her actions during that incident a simple matter of course. Like a soldier who killed her enemy on the battlefield without hesitation or mercy. That was the reason she wanted to live alone. When she graduated middle school and left her town, she said good-bye to her grandfather, her grandmother, and her mother, who still saw her as the child she was before the incident, hugging her and stroking her hair. Shino moved to this town, where the air was dusty, the water was bad, and everything was expensive. And that was when she met Kyouji Shinkawa and Gun Gale Online. When her breathing and her pulse finally started slowing, Shino let her eyelids drift open.

Lying facedown on the bed with her left cheek on her pillow put the tall vertical mirror in her line of sight. Inside the mirror, a girl with wet hair plastered across her forehead stared back. She was slightly scrawny with huge eyes. Her nose was small, and her lips were not very full. She looked like an undernourished kitten. She shared her body type and the short hair that framed her face with Sinon, sniper of the wastes, but nothing else was alike between them. Sinon was more like a fierce, feral mountain lion. The first time she overcame her terror and logged in to GGO, she ended up dragged into an incomprehensible battle and made a startling discovery. When she was in this arid virtual world, which was nothing like the real one, she could handle any kind of gun and even shoot other players with nothing worse than a bit of tension. She didn’t suffer those terrible fits. She knew immediately that she had found the means to get past her memories. As a matter of fact, since she started playing GGO, she’d become able to look at pictures of guns without having the convulsions, and she was able to talk to Kyouji about the weapons in GGO just fine. And that wasn’t all. Shino actually loved the mammoth Hecate II sniper rifle she’d won half a year ago. She felt her nerves calm when she stroked the long, smooth barrel, the way that other girls her age might stroke a pet or plush animal. When she rubbed her cheek against the rounded stock, she felt its warmth. If she continued fighting with her gun on that virtual wasteland, her wounds would eventually heal, and the fear would disappear. Thus she continued to destroy countless monsters and players with her deadly bullets. But a voice in her heart came back to her: Really? Is this really what you want? Sinon was already good enough to be considered one of the top thirty players in GGO. She wielded an antimateriel rifle with ease—a weapon that most considered beyond any player’s skill—delivering certain death to anyone caught in her scope. She was a warrior with a heart of ice, the very thing that Shino once wished she could be.

And yet in real life, Shino still couldn’t hold a simple model gun. Was it really what she wanted…? Behind her glasses, the girl in the mirror’s eyes wavered, lost and afraid. There was no refraction to the lenses in the frames she’d been wearing since last year. They weren’t a visual correction tool, but a type of armor. They were made of hardy NXT polymer, strong enough to hold firm against a bullet— according to the pamphlet. She didn’t know if that was true or not, but the expensive lenses gave her a slight feeling of security, at least. She couldn’t be at ease walking around without them now. But that only meant that she was addicted to the meaningless little accessory. She squeezed her eyes shut and felt the pitiful pleading question rise to the surface again. Someone…help…What should I do…? No one’s going to help you!! she roared to herself, trying to drive the voice of her weakness away, and bolted upright. On the small end table next to her bed, the silver AmuSphere circle glowed. She just didn’t have enough yet. That was the only issue. There were twenty-one gunners stronger than Sinon in that world. Once she’d bested them and sent them all to the underworld so she could reign supreme over the wasteland, only then… Only then could Shino and Sinon merge into one, making that true strength available to her in the real world. Only then would The Man and The Gun disappear into the midst of the countless targets she’d buried, never to surface in her memory again. Shino reached for her air-conditioning remote, turned on the heat, and stripped her uniform jacket off. She undid the hook on her skirt and pulled her legs out, then tossed it onto the floor. Last, she removed the light blue glasses and set them carefully on the edge of her desk. She lay down on the bed and put the AmuSphere over her head, feeling for the ON switch.

A quiet electronic tone signaled that the boot-up procedure was finishing. She opened her mouth. “Link Start.” The voice that came out was weak and ragged, like a child who had cried herself hoarse.

5 As the browser launched, it loaded up the preset URLs, spawning several layers of tabs. These were largely Gun Gale Online–oriented sites, particularly those that collected information on Death Gun. He controlled a 3D mouse with his right hand, switching to the site that was most active at the moment. The banner identified it as the Death Gun Information Repository, with the words Death Gun colored in red. The recent history showed that the site administrator hadn’t uploaded any details tonight, so he moved to the message board. A number of posts had been made since he checked the site last night—a blinking NEW icon appeared here and there throughout the posting tree. He read them in order. —Haven’t seen Zexceed or Tarako in a while. What’s it been, a month? Aren’t their accounts about to expire? If anyone can get in contact with them IRL, that’d be great plz —I told you, no one knows. Even their own squadron members don’t know their real contact info. I mean, anyone who reveals their private info on GGO is an idiot —We know the date and time that Death Gun shot them, so shouldn’t we be able to look up any stories about people who died at those times to see if any of them were VRMMO players? —Read the backlog, quit repeating the same topics. If you die while living alone, no one will notice, and we already know from experience that the police won’t tell us anything. And if you try writing to Zaskar in English, they just give you their canned response about private customer information. —I bet I know what this is. It’s all a big retirement prank from Zex and Tara. You guys better come out and spill the beans before everyone stops caring

anymore! —In the end, I think someone will just have to do the research with their own eyes. Anyway, I’ll be waiting outside the Central Bank of SBC Glocken at 2330 hours tomorrow night with a red rose pinned to my shirt. Come and shoot me, Death Gun. —A hero arrives! But you need to reveal your name and address before you die so we can actually check. —Actually, you should probably just dive in public from a net café. —……… He clicked his tongue in irritation and spun the mouse wheel, activating the next tab. But no matter which site or forum he visited, he did not find the precise kind of article or post that he sought. After the second one died, the rumors wondering if Death Gun’s power was real should have swept the Net, leaving every GGO player trembling in fear at the thought that they might be next, followed by waves of players deciding to give up the game for good. But in reality, the idiots on the Net still hadn’t recognized the true terror of Death Gun. They still thought it was all a big joke. The total number of active GGO accounts had barely taken a hit. He hadn’t counted on there being no real news coverage of the deaths of Zexceed and Usujio Tarako. Apparently there were enough unexplained deaths in the big city happening on any particular day that if there wasn’t an obvious criminal angle, no single one would make the news. Of course, he knew that the hearts of the two men he’d shot did stop in real life, and they had died. Because that was the power of Death Gun. The temptation to post that information directly onto one of the message boards was overwhelming. But providing a proper source would be extremely difficult for him, and more importantly, it would diminish the Death Gun legend. He was the alpha and omega, the true absolute power in that wasteland—a grim reaper whose ability surpassed the game’s management.

Well, whatever. He sighed and calmed himself down. The third Bullet of Bullets would begin soon. Death Gun planned to eliminate the lives of two players during the tournament, maybe three if he could manage it. Of course, he needed to get through the preliminary round without using the gun’s powers, but with the twenty hours a day he spent logged in, he knew his stats were good enough. The attention the BoB commanded was absolute. The livestream on MMO Stream attracted viewers far and wide, not just from GGO but from all manner of VRMMOs. Once he was both the unquestioned champion of the greatest stage and the people he shot disappeared from the Net, none of the fools would ever doubt the power of Death Gun again. After the attention that would garner, he wouldn’t be able to use his current account anymore, but that wasn’t a problem. As long as he had the gun, it would be easy for a new Death Gun to descend upon the sands. And he would kill more. His plans called for the number of victims to rise to seven. By then, players would be leaving in droves, and Gun Gale Online itself would eventually succumb to death. Death Gun would become a legend. It wouldn’t match up to the sheer body count of the cursed Sword Art Online, but that was simply the act of a madman frying his players’ brains with microwaves. The power of Death Gun was much more than that. The virtual bullets he shot could stop a heart in real life. No one understood the secret of how he worked aside from him and his counterpart. Death Gun was supreme. The Black Swordsman who was rumored to have beaten SAO was nothing. The moment would come very soon that he took his rightful place as the greatest VRMMO player in existence. Absolute power—legendary tyrant—supremacy—supremacy—supremacy… He eventually noticed that he was clenching the mouse so hard, he might crush it. Slowly, he relaxed his shoulder, breathing heavily.

The day couldn’t come soon enough. Once the legend was his, he had no use for this worthless world any longer. Never again would he be plagued by the asinine cretins. He closed all of the browser tabs and opened up a local HTML file. It contained a vertical list of seven mugshots—screencaps from GGO cut and pasted. To the right of each picture was a name and list of weapon information. The pictures of Zexceed and Usujio Tarako at the top were dimmed out and covered with a large X the color of blood. This was Death Gun’s target list. Or put a different way, it was the number of Death Bullets loaded into his magazine. All seven of them were famous, powerful GGO players. He scrolled slowly through the file until the bottom picture came front and center. It was the only female player of the seven. The screenshot was taken from a right diagonal angle. She had short, pale blue hair tied into tufts that framed her face and covered the line of her cheek. Unfortunately, the sand-yellow muffler hid her mouth from view, but the catlike indigo eyes held a bright allure to them. The information to the right said her name was Sinon. Her main weapon was the antimateriel sniper rifle, Ultima Ratio Hecate II. He had seen her in person within the game many times. Shopping in the market district of Glocken, chewing on cart-sold hot dogs on a park bench, and running into battle with that enormous rifle strapped to her back. Every one of these actions was infused with a coquettish charm that stoked his desire to own her. She almost never smiled, and there was always a note of some kind of lament in her eyes, but that only increased his interest. He was conflicted about including this Sinon girl on his target list. If she could made to be his in body and spirit, not just in the game, but in real life as well… But his other half, Death Gun’s matching arm, would want her dead. Sinon was famed throughout GGO as the cruel, bloodless sniper, the goddess of the underworld. No flower could be more appropriate to sacrifice to the legend of Death Gun.

He reached out and stroked the image of Sinon with a fingertip. Within the sensation of the slick, glowing panel, he felt the softness and warmth of her body.

6 I turned on my blinker, leaned the frame sideways, and passed through the large gate. Instantly, I felt the accusing stares of the pedestrians on either side of the tree-lined street, and abruptly slowed the motorcycle down. In the midst of the increasing use of electric scooters, the crappy old Thai 125 cc two-stroke dirt bike I got through Agil’s help made an astonishing amount of noise. Every time Suguha sat on the back, she complained that it was noisy, smelly, and uncomfortable. I tried to tease her by saying that she couldn’t be like the wind if she didn’t understand that sound, but secretly I wished that I had bought one of the four-stroke scooters made after the exhaust regulations kicked in. Especially when I was riding it on the grounds of a hospital. I puttered along the street with the speed of a donkey pulling a cart until eventually a parking garage came into view. With a sigh of relief, I drove inside and stopped the bike at the special motorcycle section in the corner, pulling out the archaic ignition key and pulling off my helmet. The chilly winter air brought a faint scent of disinfectant with it. It was the Saturday after my high-priced-cake meeting with Kikuoka. He sent me a message saying that the location was prepared for me to log in to Gun Gale Online. I made the trip with heavy heart, but was surprised to find the address was for a large municipal hospital in Chiyoda Ward. I hardly ever had a reason to visit the city center of Tokyo, but I didn’t get lost along the way. The physical rehabilitation center attached to this hospital complex was the place where I’d rebuilt my strength after escaping SAO.

Even after the monthlong stay there, I had to make the trip time after time for tests and other procedures. I hadn’t been here in six months, but the sight of that familiar white building filled me with a strange, confusing mix of nostalgia and loneliness. I shook my head to brush off the sentiment and headed for the entrance. The conversation I had with Asuna six days ago at the Imperial Palace nearby, where I first explained the situation, played back in my head. “Wh-whaaat?! K-Kirito, you’re…quitting ALO?!” Asuna’s wide, shocked eyes were beginning to well up, so I quickly shook my head to put her at ease. “N-no, no! It’s just for a few days! I’ll convert back as soon as it’s done! A-as a matter of fact…I need to go and observe this other VRMMO for a bit…” Asuna’s panic melted away, to be replaced by a skeptical look. “Observe…? Haven’t you been just making new accounts up until now? Why would you need to convert?” “Well, it’s because…of the four-eyes in the Ministry of Internal Affairs…” With great difficulty, I explained how a large part of the reason I’d chosen the palace for our date spot was based on Seijirou Kikuoka’s summons, intentionally leaving out certain details of the story. The story finished up just as we reached the gate. We returned our tickets there and were crossing the Hirakawa Gate bridge when Asuna gave voice to her feelings, looking conflicted. “Well, if Mr. Kikuoka’s asking you, I guess you don’t have a choice…but sometimes I wonder if he can really be fully trusted. I mean, I know we owe him a lot, but still…” “I completely agree with you.” We grinned wryly at each other. The smile quickly vanished from her face, and she squeezed my hand. “…Just come back as quickly as you can. There’s only one home for us.”

I nodded and looked down at the surface of the moat. “Of course. I’ll be back in ALO before you know it. I’m just doing a bit of research on what’s happening inside Gun Gale Online.” …That’s right. I did not say a single word to Asuna about the true nature of Kikuoka’s request—that I would be making contact with the player Death Gun, who (supposedly) wielded a mysterious power beyond the bounds of the game. I knew if I explained that, she would either stop me or demand to infiltrate the game with me. I knew it was a selfish desire, but I had no intention of letting her anywhere near any virtual world with a hint of real danger about it. Of course, I was sure the stories about Death Gun were 99 percent fictionalized. A man who could kill a virtual player in real life. At no point could I bring myself to believe it was true. The AmuSphere was nothing but an extension of the classic television set. It was easy to think of the full-dive virtual worlds as a kind of technological magic, but in reality, they were simple, useful tools—not magical items that transported the user’s soul to a faroff land. But it was that last 1 percent that had brought me here. Several months ago, I was organizing some old digital magazines that had built up on my PC’s drive, and I stumbled across a short interview with Argus’s development director, Akihiko Kayaba, just before SAO launched. In it, I found the following quote. THE NAME AINCRAD IS AN ABBREVIATION OF “AN INCARNATING RADIUS,” MEANING AN ACTUALIZED WORLD. WITHIN THIS WORLD, PLAYERS WILL SEE THEIR DREAMS COME TO LIFE. SWORDS, MONSTERS, LABYRINTHS—THIS WORLD NOT ONLY BRINGS THESE SYMBOLS OF GAMING INTO REAL FORM, IT HAS THE POWER TO CHANGE THE PLAYER HIMSELF.

I had indeed changed. So had Asuna. And Agil, and Klein, and Liz, and Silica. Everyone who experienced those two years inside the game had changed to a degree that they could never be their old selves again. But what if Kayaba’s “change” was more than that…? Thanks to The Seed— the VRMMO creation package—there was now a VR Nexus made of infinitely multiplying virtual worlds. Was it possible that somewhere, in some tiny corner of the Nexus, there was some element that freely overwrote the boundary between virtual life and real life? The automatic door buzzed open and brought a wave of heated air and disinfectant that cut through my uncollected thoughts. In any case, if two players had died in the real world, I couldn’t guarantee with absolute certainty that there was no danger in contacting Death Gun. If I admitted this to Asuna after returning to ALO, she would be mad, but in the end, she would understand. She would know that as Kirito, the man who prematurely ended the Aincrad time line and unleashed The Seed upon the world, I didn’t have any other choice in the matter. After a quick stop in the restroom, I followed the instructions on the printout of Kikuoka’s e-mail to reach a third-floor room in the hospital’s inpatient ward. There was no patient name in the placard on the wall. I knocked on the door and opened it up. “Hey! Good to see you again, Kirigaya!” It was a familiar nurse I’d known while I was in rehabilitation. The long hair beneath her nurse’s cap was tied into one thick, three-strand braid with a little white ribbon waving at the end. Her tall frame, packed into the light pink nurse’s uniform, created a tempting silhouette for any new patient to behold. A small name tag on her left breast read AKI. The put-on smile she wore was as purifying and welcoming as an angel’s, but I knew that she could be every bit as frightening as the situation warranted, and I wasn’t fooled. After a second of paralysis and surprise, I hastily bowed. “Ah…h-hello, it’s been a while.”

Nurse Aki stretched out her arms and abruptly grabbed my shoulders, squeezing my upper arms and the sides of my stomach. “Wh-whoa!” “Look at you, you’ve got some meat on those bones again. But not enough yet. Have you been eating properly?” “I-I have, I have. But why are you here, Ms. Aki…?” I looked around the cramped room, but she was the only one inside. “I got the story from that government man with the glasses. He says you’re doing some kind of virtual…network? Research thingy? And not even a year after you got out, you poor boy. Well, he said that since I was in charge of your physical rehab, he wanted me to monitor your condition here, so I’m off my regular shift for today. Those government agents really do have that national power to push people around—he cleared it with the chief nurse and everything. So here’s to some more time together, Kirigaya!” “Ah…i-it’s a pleasure, ma’am…” Very clever of you, knowing I can’t argue back against a pretty nurse, Kikuokaaaaa, I cursed the absent agent. Instead, I was all smiles for Nurse Aki as I shook her hand. “…So the four-eyed agent isn’t here, then?” “No, he said there was a meeting he couldn’t skip. He had a message for you, though.” I took the manila envelope and pulled out a handwritten note. Send your report to the usual e-mail address. Be sure to expense all costs incurred, as you will be reimbursed along with your payment when the operation is complete. P.S. Don’t let your hormonal urges get the best of you while you’re alone in the room with that pretty young nurse. I immediately tore the note and envelope into shreds and stuffed the pieces into my jacket pocket. If Nurse Aki happened to see that, I’d be taken to taken to a real court for harassment.

She blinked at me suspiciously. I answered that look with a nervous smile. “Well, uh…Let’s get connected to the Net, then…” “Ah, of course. It’s all set up for you.” She showed me to a gel bed with a number of imposing monitoring tools next to it. A brand-new silver AmuSphere hung gleaming over the headrest. “Out of your clothes now, Kirigaya.” “P-pardon?!” “I’ve got to pop the electrodes on. No use being shy—I saw it all when you were hospitalized here.” “…Is…just the top okay…?” She thought it over for a moment, then mercifully nodded a yes. I obediently took off my jacket and long-sleeved shirt before lying down on the bed. She quickly slapped a few electrodes in various places on my upper half, to help monitor my heart activity. The AmuSphere itself had a heart rate monitor, but Kikuoka wanted to be thorough, just in case the unit itself was hacked into. That, at least, reassured me that he really was concerned about my safety. “And that should do it…” The nurse performed one last check of the monitoring tools and nodded. I reached up for the AmuSphere, fitted it over my head, and turned it on. “Okay, well…here I go. It’ll probably be a four-or five-hour dive, just so you know…” “Sure thing. I’ll be watching your body very closely, so don’t worry about anything back here.” “Th-thanks a lot…” I closed my eyes at last, wondering how exactly I’d gotten myself to this position. A little ticking sound in my ears let me know the device was powered up and ready to go. “Link Start,” I commanded. Familiar beams of light covered my vision, tearing my mind free of my body.

The moment I landed in the world, something felt off. A few seconds later, I understood why. The entire sky was yellow with a trace of pale red. As I understood it, time inside Gun Gale Online was synchronized with real time. So just after one o’clock in the afternoon, the sky should have been the same shade of blue that I’d seen through the hospital window a moment ago. What was the reason for this gloomy shade of twilight, then? After a few moments of wondering, I shrugged my shoulders to clear my head. The setting of GGO was the wasteland of Earth after the Last Great War. The coloring might just be an effect to add to the postapocalyptic setting. Ahead of me was the majesty of the capital city at the center of the world of GGO, SBC Glocken. As befitting the king of sci-fi VRMMOs, the vibe it gave off was completely different from the fantasy cities of ALfheim’s Yggdrasil, atop the World Tree, and the major cities of Aincrad. A host of metallic-looking high-rises loomed tall and dark in the sky, connected by a network of midair walkways. Colorful neon holograms were plastered in the spaces between the buildings, and increased in number closer to the ground to form a flood of color and sound. I looked down to see that I was standing not on dirt or rock, but a street fitted with metal plating. Behind me was a domed structure that was apparently the spawning point for newly created characters, while ahead of me was the wide main street heading into town. Weird little shops crowded the sides of the street, reminding me of the back alleys of Akihabara in real life. The players I saw walking the street all had a distinctly dangerous air about them. And there were, overwhelmingly, more men than women. Perhaps it was because my home game was the more female-popular ALO, with its world of dainty fairies, but the sight of so many imposing, well-muscled men in camo military jackets and black body armor was imposing, to say the least. Calling it energetic would be putting it nicely; the word I’d choose was sweaty. Every last

one had a mean look in his eyes that said, Don’t talk to me. There were other reasons to be intimidated. Such as the fact that the majority of the players were carrying large, black guns over shoulder or waist. Unlike the more decorative aspects of swords or spears, guns existed for one purpose: to be weapons. They were all designed and shaped in order to best defeat the enemy and nothing more. It occurred to me that this was something that could be said about this entire world. The aims of this game world were refined and distilled into three simple things: fight, kill, take. Everything that made ALO what it was, the idea of living another life in a world of fantasy, was stripped clean out of GGO. If anything, an appearance that suggested delicacy or prettiness was only a downside. How much menace you could inflict upon the opponent in battle with appearance alone was clearly a significant variable here. Most of the men wore scruffy beards or had large, ugly facial scars to help achieve this effect. So what did my avatar look like? I realized that I didn’t know yet, and looked down at my body. If I was going to draw the attention of Death Gun by being an infamous badass, I’d want to look like a macho soldier out of some Hollywood action flick… …but I had a bad premonition. Both of my hands were pale and smooth, with shockingly slender fingers. My body, clad in black military fatigues, seemed even more fragile than my real body in places. Based on my line of sight, I didn’t feel very tall, either. As I told Asuna earlier, I hadn’t created my own character from scratch for Gun Gale Online. If I did, who knew how long it would take for me to encounter Death Gun, who only targeted the game’s most powerful players. All of the game worlds based on the VRMMO support package known as The Seed—technically called the Cardinal system—shared just one meta-rule that applied to each and every one: the character conversion system. As long as your game was created with The Seed, you could not deactivate this feature.

By using the conversion system, a player could take a character’s data from one game and transfer it to a different game run by an entirely different company. It was similar in concept to the SIM cards that allowed one to transfer their phone data to a new model from an entirely different carrier. Let’s say you had a character in Game A that had a Toughness of 100 and Speed of 80, and you wanted to transfer that character to Game B. Your strength in Game A would run through a relative value converter, which might give you a Strength of 40 and Agility of 30 in Game B. In short, an aboveaverage muscular warrior in ALO would become an above-average soldier in GGO. Naturally, this was not designed for copying characters. The moment an avatar was converted, the original in the old world disappeared entirely. Not just that, it was only the character that moved, not the items and equipment, so while the process was convenient, it did require some courage to go through with. In transferring “Kirito the Spriggan” from ALO to GGO, I had no choice but to dump nearly all of my items into Agil’s new pawnshop storage back in Yggdrasil City. Anyone else who wasn’t as lucky to know a trustworthy partner like him would have to get rid of their entire material fortune. So the conversion process gave me a character equal in strength to Kirito in ALO, although given that I had started over from scratch there, I wasn’t as allpowerful as the Kirito from the original SAO. But since I couldn’t bring my appearance and items with me, I had no idea what sort of look I’d be given. Hopefully, I was blessed with a menacing soldier look, but… I looked around the area, a bad premonition crawling up my neck, and noticed that the outer wall of the dome I’d just exited was made of reflective glass. My eyes went wide. “Wh-what the hell is this?!” The person I saw in the reflection was a hundred light-years away from the look I was hoping to get. The height was even shorter than my Spriggan form, and more slender. The hair was still black, just as before, but now it flowed smoothly from the back of

my head down to my shoulder blades. Like my hands, the skin of my face was pale white, with brilliant red lips. Although the color of my eyes was still the black of my previous character, they were much larger and shinier. In fact, framed by the long eyelashes, the innocently bewitching gaze that came back at me from the reflection was so different that I momentarily forgot it was me and looked away shyly. I straightened up and let out a long sigh. Asuna used to tell me that the SAO Kirito had quite a girlish face, but this went way beyond that. I stood there, wondering how in the world I would turn myself into a menacing soldier looking like this, when a guy who had been eating something off to the side rushed up behind me. “Oooh, miss, you’re so lucky! That’s an F-1300 line avatar! You hardly ever see that type generated. Hey, since you just started, feel like selling your account? I’ll give you two mega-credits!”

“…” I stared at him, my mind a total blank. Suddenly, an uncomfortable possibility occurred to me, and I hastily patted my chest. Fortunately, what I felt was flat and solid, and not the rounded softness I was afraid of finding. My features were feminine, but my avatar hadn’t undergone a sex change in the conversion process. In almost every VR game nowadays, players were forbidden from playing the opposite of their real-life sex. Long-term use of an avatar of the opposite sex apparently caused undeniable mental and physical effects. But because the player’s sex was determined based on reading brain waves, there were very rare occasions that one was identified as the other side, and suffered quite a shock when they dove in for the first time. Based on what we knew now, Kayaba must have already understood the ill effects of crossing those streams—at the start of the original SAO, gender choice was free to the player, but we were all forcibly reverted to our original state soon after being trapped inside… I realized that I was getting lost in my own thoughts, so I concentrated on the fellow before me and shrugged. “Uh…Sorry, I’m a dude.” Even my voice was high enough to be a reasonably alto female voice. Disappointed, I waited for his answer, but he was at a loss for words. When he found his tongue again, it was actually twice as excited as before. “Then…you’re an M-9000 series?! N-no way! I’ll pay four—no, five megacredits. Please, just sell it to me!!” On the contrary, I’d have been happy to give it to him for free, or even exchange looks, but that was sadly not an option. “Umm…Listen, this isn’t a new character, it’s a conversion. Can’t sell this one for money, sorry.” “Oh…I see…” He took one last regretful, thorough examination of my face from all angles,

then recovered his spirits somewhat. “Some people say that having a really well-used account before conversion ups your chances of snagging a rare avatar. If you don’t mind me asking, how much playing time did you put into your previous game?” “Huh? P-playing time?” I thought it over. The total playing time for Kirito the swordsman, the account I’d taken from SAO to ALO, was at least two years long…Which would be 730 days times 24 hours… “Let’s see…ten thou…” I started answering honestly, then quickly covered it up. The VRMMO genre itself was barely three years old, so the only players who could have ten thousand hours logged were former SAO players, and I didn’t want to reveal that about myself. “Er, I mean, a year. It’s probably just a lucky coincidence.” “Oh, I see…Well, let me know if you ever change your mind.” He took out a clear card of some kind and pushed it into my hands before reluctantly trudging off. As I stared at the card, which featured his name, gender, and guild, it began to glow and disappeared. That probably meant the information had automatically been added to my in-game data file. Unable to get over this betrayal, I glared at my reflection in the glass. It didn’t seem like there was anything I could do about it. My conversion history was saved into my character data, so if I converted back to ALO I would once again be the spiky-haired Spriggan, but any time I tried to switch to GGO, I would still be this unidentifiable avatar somewhere between girl and boy. Determined to live up to my motto of finding the silver lining in any cloud, I spent a few minutes until I came up with one definitive “good thing” about it. The only reason I was in this game was to make contact with the player known as Death Gun, and observe and assess his powers for myself, hopefully not by getting shot. In order to achieve that goal, I had to garner attention by displaying my strength.

Given the type of game GGO was, there were doubtless very few female players, so my feminine appearance, while not what I was hoping to look like, would at least help me stand out. I wouldn’t be imposing any kind of pressure in battle, so I’d have to make up for it with skill. As far as advertising my strength, I already had a plan for that. It took time to make a name for yourself with standard play—conquering dungeons, or the unsavory practice of PKing. But fortunately for me, this was the very day that they were starting an event called the Bullet of Bullets, a tournament for determining the best player in GGO. I’d enter the tournament and jump into the battle royale. If I could hit the upper ranks and get my name out there, Death Gun would take notice—and he might even be in the tournament already. I had no idea how well I could fight in a game I’d never played before, but there was no better alternative than trying it out. I knew that fighting with guns wasn’t the same as the ranged battles with archers and mages in ALO, but as long as they were both VRMMOs, there would be some common ground. I’d do the very best I could—and if that wasn’t good enough, the ultimate fault lay with Kikuoka for putting this ridiculous mission on my shoulders. At any rate, first came registering for the tournament, and then came equipment. I gave one last glance at my reflection and snorted before heading off down the main street. When I realized that I was unconsciously stroking the long hair off of my cheeks, I felt a deep gloom settle over my mind. Within minutes, I was lost. The strangely named SBC Glocken was made of a number of vast floors stacked atop one another. As I looked upward, it seemed to be like a compressed version of Aincrad’s many floors looming overhead, with a small opening far above that admitted the sunset sky. Large buildings cut through the floors, and a variety of floating hallways, escalators, and elevators crossed here and there in beautiful disarray, but the complexity of it all was worthy of a dungeon. I could call up a detailed map from the menu screen, of course, but it was not

easy to match the location noted on the map with what I was actually seeing in real time. In a single-player RPG, I would wander around in a daze, never to return to my original location, but this was an MMO—there was only one thing to do. I checked out the crowd of people around me, looking for another player rather than an NPC, then trotted over and called out for help. “Um, excuse me, could you give me directio—” I immediately regretted my decision. The person I’d caught ended up being a girl. Her pale blue hair was cut short in a careless style, but the fine braids tied at the sides of her forehead made for a memorable accent. Below her sharp eyebrows gleamed large, dark blue eyes with a feline hint to them, followed by a petite nose and lightly colored lips. Wondering on the spot if this might be another misleadingly feminine avatar like mine, I made a quick inspection of the player’s body, but the unzipped jacket beneath her sand-colored muffler bulged in the properly feminine ways. On top of that, she was quite small; I just didn’t notice because my line of sight was lower than usual. In a VRMMO, a good three-quarters of the time that a male player asked a female for directions, he was actually just hitting on her. As I feared, the look on her face was of obvious suspicion—but it didn’t last very long. “…Is it your first time here? Where are you going?” she asked in a beautifully clear voice. There was a hint of a smile on her lips. I wondered what had prompted this response, then realized the answer. She was making the same mistake that the avatar buyer had just minutes ago: She thought I was a girl. Well, that was just great. “Uh, erm…” I nearly corrected her about my gender on the spot, but stopped myself in time.

In a way, this was the perfect situation. If I backed out here and found a male player to ask, and he mistook me for a girl as well, it would only complicate matters. My second motto was to make use of whatever I could, which in this case meant that this poor girl would have to stay under her mistaken assumption for a while. “Yes, it’s my first time playing. I need to find a cheap weapons shop and this place called the regent’s office,” I answered, my voice slightly lower and huskier than hers. She looked confused. “Regent’s office? Why?” “Um…I was going to enter the battle-royale event that’s coming up…” Her large eyes blinked in surprise and went wide. “You…just started playing today, right? There’s nothing stopping you from entering, but you might not be good enough to last…” “Oh, this isn’t a brand-new character. I converted from another game.” “Ahh, I see.” Her indigo eyes sparkled, and an honest smile broke across her lips this time. “Do you mind if I ask why you decided to switch to this dusty, greasy game?” “Because…um, I’ve played all fantasy games until this point, and I was in the mood to try something more cyber-ish…And I’m kind of curious about what it’s like to have a gunfight.” This wasn’t exactly a lie. After honing my VRMMO skills on close-range sword combat for so long, I wondered how well that skill would translate to the vastly different style of GGO. “I see. Well, you’ve got real guts to challenge the BoB right off the bat,” she chuckled. “All right, I’ll show you where to go. I was on my way to the regent’s office too, anyway. But before that, a gun shop. What kind of firearms are you into?” “Umm…” I didn’t have an immediate answer. As it became clear that I didn’t know, she grinned once more.

“We should visit a nice big market with lots of selection, then. That’ll be this way.” She spun around and took off. I hurried after the swaying muffler. We passed through so many twisting alleys and moving walkways and stairs that I was certain I’d never be able to recall the path we took. After several minutes, we came on another wide-open street. Directly in front was a huge, flashy store that looked like a giant foreign supermarket chain. “That’s it,” she said, pointing to the building as she weaved through the crowd. The interior of the vast store was full of color, light, and sound, like an amusement park. The NPC shopkeepers were all beautiful women in revealing silver outfits flashing dazzling smiles, which made it all the more shocking to see them holding, and surrounded on all sides by, menacing dark handguns and machine guns. “This is…quite a store,” I muttered, and the girl next to me chuckled. “It’s usually easier to get the good bargains at the deeper specialty shops than these all-purpose stores that sell to newbies. But you can also use this place to find the type of gun you’d like, and then go do your shopping elsewhere.” Now that she mentioned it, the players milling about the establishment seemed to be wearing more colorful attire than the average, and compared to her veteran desert-colored fatigues, they came across as amateurish. “All right. What type of build are you playing?” I paused. Though I had converted between very different worlds, my character’s general leanings should have been preserved. “Um, mostly strength, followed by speed…I guess?” “So you’re a STR-AGI type, then. You could be a midrange fighter with a heavier assault rifle or a large-caliber machine gun as your main weapon and a handgun for your sub…Oh, but you just converted, didn’t you? So you won’t have much money…” “Ah…r-right.”

I waved my right hand to bring up the menu. Though I kept my statistics, I lost all my items and money in the transfer. So the number displayed at the bottom of my item storage said… “Um, one thousand credits.” “…Exactly the starter sum.” We looked at each other and laughed nervously. “Hmm,” she murmured, putting her fingers to her chin and tilting her head in thought. “With that amount, you might only be able to get a small raygun. Or on the live-ammo side, a used revolver, perhaps…But then again, if you’re interested…” I sensed what she was about to suggest and quickly shook my head. No matter the MMO, it was never wise for a newbie to get too much assistance from a veteran player. I wasn’t here to enjoy the game, but there were still rules that a gamer had to follow. “N-no, that’s all right. So…is there somewhere that I can earn a bunch of money really fast? I thought I heard there was a casino in this game…” The girl looked troubled at this idea. “That kind of thing is best to jump into when you’ve got plenty of money and expect to lose what you wager. But it’s true that there are places you can gamble, big and small. In fact, even in here…” She spun around and pointed toward the back. “There’s a game just over there, see?” Her slender finger was pointing to a large machine, flashing with electric lights. Upon approaching it, I found that it was too big to be called a game machine—it covered the entire wall. It had to be nearly ten feet tall and sixty feet wide. It was surrounded by a waist-high fence set into the metallic floor tiles, and an NPC dressed like an Old West gunman stood watch in the back. There was no fence at the near end, only a revolving metal bar and a square pillar that looked like a cashier box. Behind the gunman, who regularly drew his oversized revolver from its

holster to spin it on his finger and offer challenges to passersby, was a brick wall riddled with countless bulletholes. At the top of that wall was a pink neon sign reading UNTOUCHABLE! “What’s this?” I asked. She pointed out the features for me. “It’s a game where you go in the gate at the front and see how close you can get to the NPC at the back without being hit. There, see where the high score is?” Her finger indicated a glowing red line on the floor behind the fence. It was just over two-thirds down the length of the space. “Oh…and how much do you win?” “Well, it costs five hundred credits to play, and you get a thousand for reaching ten meters, and double that for fifteen. Oh, and if you actually touch the gunman, you win back all of the money that’s been put into the game so far.” “All of it?!” “See the carryover amount on the sign? Ten, hundred…three hundred thousand credits and change.” “That’s…quite a sum.” “Yeah, well, it’s impossible,” she said flatly. “Once you get past the eightmeter mark, the gunman starts doing this high-speed firing pattern that’s a total cheat. He’s got an ultra-fast reload and three-point burst somehow, even though it’s just a revolver. By the time you see the bullet line, it’s already too late.” “Bullet line…” She pulled on my sleeve and whispered into my ear, “Look, someone’s going to add to the pool right now.” I tore my eyes from the gunman to see that a group of three men were approaching the game. One of them, clad in a wintry white-and-gray camo jacket, strode up to the gate with purpose. He pressed his palm to the cashier terminal, which erupted

into a bright fanfare to indicate that a transaction had taken place. Nearly a dozen people wandered up from elsewhere in the store to watch. The NPC gunman drawled something in English that I took as a threat to “blast your ass to the moon,” and put a hand to the gun in his holster. A large, green, holographic number three appeared in the air before the Arctic camo challenger, then beeped down to zero, at which point the metal bar clanked open. “Rrraaagh!” He roared and raced forward, then abruptly threw his legs wide to come to a stop, his eyes wide-open. He tilted his upper half to the right and lifted his left hand and leg up into the air in a truly comical stance. Before I could wonder what kind of dance he was doing, three shining red bullets passed to the left of his head, through the space under his left arm, and below his left knee. While I’d been distracted, the gunman had fired three quick bullets in succession. The man’s evasion was impressive—but it seemed as though he knew where the bullets would be fired. “Were those…trajectories?” I murmured to the blue-haired girl, who nodded and answered: “Yes, he evaded the bullets by watching the bullet lines.” The man in the camo took off on another mad dash when the lines of fire were gone, then stopped again, just as quickly. This time he opened his legs wider and bent over ninety degrees at the waist. With a high-pitched whine, two bullets flew over his head and another passed through his legs. Another rush forward, another abrupt stop. It was like a game of “Red Light, Green Light.” The camo man showed considerable agility in proceeding forward seven meters. Just three more, and he’d be able to win back double what he paid to play—but that’s when it all went wrong. Until now, the NPC gunman had been firing three shots in the same pattern: pause, two shots, one shot. The man jumped to evade the last shot, but lost his balance and put a hand to the ground when he landed. By the time he

recovered, it was already too late—the gunman’s hand flashed, and the shot caught him on his white vest, shooting orange sparks. The sound system played another flare, this one droopy and mocking. The gunmen swore in triumph, and the pool total on the wall behind him shot up 500 with a jingle. The Arctic camo man slumped back toward the gate. “…See?” The girl shrugged, hiding a grin behind her muffler. “It would be one thing if you could dart left and right, but it’s pretty much a straight shot forward, so you always get beat right around there.” “Hmm…I see. So it’s already too late by the time you see the trajectory lines,” I muttered to myself, heading for the gate. “Oh…Hey, wait,” she called out in surprise, trying to stop me. I grinned back with one cheek and put my palm against the cashier. It made an old-fashioned cha-ching sound. The onlookers and the previous challenger’s group both murmured in surprise, either at another foolish attempt so soon, or at seeing my appearance. The girl with the muffler had her hands on her hips, shaking her head in disapproval. The gunman drawled a different taunt this time, followed by the same countdown. I dropped my hips and took a dashing stance. The instant that it hit zero and the metal bar swung open, I burst forward. Within a few steps, the gunman’s hand rose and three red lines appeared from the end of his gun. They pointed at my head, right breast, and left leg. As soon as this registered in my head, I leaped forward to the right as hard as I could. An orange bullet tracer shot past my left side. I kicked the panel on the right and returned to the center of the lane. Naturally, this was my first experience against a gun within a VRMMO. There were many monsters who used ranged attacks like arrows, poison projectiles, or magic spells in ALO and even SAO. There was one way to evade these attacks. You had to read the enemy’s eyes. It had to have been a sticking

point with Akihiko Kayaba—every VRMMO monster run by the Cardinal system looked directly at its target when it attacked…but only if the creature actually had optical organs that could be classified as eyes. That golden rule had to apply to the NPC gunman as well. I focused not on the red bullet lines or the black muzzle of the gun, only on the gunman’s eyes. I could sense the trajectories of his shots just from the lifeless twitching of those eyes. When they moved, I darted just enough to avoid them, left and right, up and down, weaving my way around the silent lines. Each time a bullet passed, I was already in position for the next leap forward. I must have passed the ten-meter mark by the time he finished the second set of three, because a brief sound effect played. I barely even registered it. The gunman released his empty cylinder, sprayed the spent cartridges behind him and popped in a full six bullets with one motion, then clicked the frame back into place within the span of half a second—cheating, indeed—then pointed it at me again. His next attack was not the same crisp three-shot pattern. The shots came irregularly; two, one, then three. I evaded out of sheer instinct, closing another five meters. There was another brief jingle, and the gunman’s lightning-quick reload. There were only five meters left. I could see his whiskered face, twisted in what I imagined was disgust. Beneath the ten-gallon hat, his black beady eyes swiped sideways across my chest. I determined that dodging to the side was impossible, so I flopped down and slid on the tile. The six shots flew like machine-gun fire, but I’d bought myself half of the remaining distance. The enemy was out of bullets again. With another half a second to reload, I had enough time to reach him. But as I got to my feet, I thought I saw the gunman’s eyes twinkle with pleasure. On the spot, I changed gears and leaped as high as I could.

The air I’d previously occupied was burned through by six lasers that shot out of his revolver without reloading. What the hell was that?! I did a flip in midair and landed just in front of the gunman. Though I was tempted to drop a catchy one-liner, I didn’t want to find out what other tricks he had up his sleeve—laser beams from his eyes?—so I silently slapped his leather vest instead. There was a moment of silence, as if all the sound was sucked out of the store. “Oh my Gaaww—!!” The gunman screamed and put his hands on his head, then fell to his knees. A mad fanfare played overhead. A rattling sound caused me to look up and see that the brick wall behind the gunman was crumbling outward. Before I even had time to be surprised by this, a fountain of coins was raining out, pouring over my legs and vanishing with nice little tinkling sound effects. The big counter underneath the neon sign was dropping with eye-popping speed, and hit zero just as the waterfall of gold dried up. An awful clanging bounced off the walls of the store, then the game reset itself. The gunman was back on his feet, twirling the pistol around his finger and spouting challenges again, but after the illegal twelve-shot maneuver he just exhibited, no one in the crowd was likely to take the bait. “…Whew.” I took a breath and left through the exit on the left-hand fence. Suddenly, a roar of murmurs spread through the crowd, which had grown to twice its previous size. I heard people wondering who I was and what in the world I’d done. The little blue-haired girl trotted over from the side of the crowd and stared at me with her catlike eyes. After a few seconds, she finally said something, her voice hoarse.

“…What kind of reflexes do you have…? That last one, where you were right in front of him…You dodged a laser from six feet away…From that distance, there’s almost zero time lag between the bullet line and the actual bullet!” “Umm…well…” I struggled, trying to find the right thing to say. “This thing’s basically a game where you predict where the bullet prediction will be, right?” “P-predict the prediction?!” she yelped adorably, loud enough for the entire store to hear. Everyone in the crowd simply gaped, openmouthed. A few minutes later, once the audience had drifted off, I was in a corner of the store, examining a case of rifles. “Hmm…I don’t get this assault rifle. Why is it so big, when the caliber is smaller than a submachine gun?” I asked the nice girl, who was still helping me. She still seemed like a cat trapped between caution and curiosity, staring at me like some kind of unfamiliar creature. “…How could you have that much evasive skill, and not even know this basic information? You said you converted, right? What kind of game was it?” “Umm…Just, y’know, one of the fantasy kind…” “Oh. Well, whatever. If you enter the BoB, you’ll get a good look at what real combat is like. So what were you asking—why assault rifles are so small-caliber? Well, it starts with the American M16, which they designed for small, highspeed rounds that offered increased accuracy and penetration…” She trailed off with a sour face, like she couldn’t believe what she was saying. That odd reaction disappeared instantly, replaced by a gentle smile. “…But that doesn’t matter, does it? Come on, let’s finish up your shopping.” “Uh…yeah, thanks,” I said, nodding suspiciously. She looked away from me and began strolling past the large display case. “You won 300K, so you should be able to afford something nice…but ultimately it all comes down to personal preference, so that’s what we need to figure out first.” “Preference, huh…?” I followed the girl, eyeing the many black and gleaming guns, but none of

them stood out to me. That made sense, as I knew nothing about guns, other than that there were revolvers and automatics. As I agonized, I eventually reached the very last one of the cases that filled the store from end to end. At this point, she ought to just pick one out for me, I thought—until something caught my eye. In the corner of the long display case was a selection of things that looked like metal tubes, clearly not guns. They were about an inch across and ten inches long. On one end was a metal tool that looked like a climber’s carabiner, while the other end was slightly wider and featured a black hole that seemed likely to shoot something. If it was in this place, it was probably some kind of gun, but there was no grip or trigger of any kind. The only other feature was a small switch high on the side of the tube. “Um…what are these?” I asked the girl. She looked back and shrugged her shoulders, which seemed to be a typical reaction for her. “Oh, those are lightswords.” “L-lightswords?” “Yes. As in swords of light. The official title is ‘photon sword,’ but everyone just calls them laser blades, or lightsabers, or beam sabers, or whatever they want.” “S-swords?! There are swords in this game?” I leaned over to get a better look at the case. Now that she’d put the image in my head, they did indeed resemble the tools used by those force-wielding knights from the sci-fi movies of old. “Sure there are, but no one actually uses them.” “Why not?” “Because…you have to be at point-blank range to hit anyone, and you’ll be pumped full of lead before you can get close enough to…” She trailed off and stared at me, her mouth hanging open. I nearly gave her a nasty grin back, but salvaged it into a gentler, reassuring smile.

“So I just need to get close enough.” “L-look, I know you’re real good at dodging, but against a full-auto rifle—ah!” I had already turned away from her and tapped on a particular photon sword whose matte black finish I liked. When the pop-up menu appeared, I hit BUY, and an NPC employee came rushing over at top speed with a smile and a metal panel. When it dawned on me that the panel had the same green scanner that the game cashier did, I knew to put my palm on it. It made another register sound, and the black photon sword buzzed into existence on top of the panel. I picked it up, and the employee thanked me for my purchase, then hurried back in the direction she’d come from. “Well, no taking it back now,” the girl said, giving me a look with her head tilted at forty-five degrees. “To each their own, I guess.” “Hey, if they’re selling this, it must be possible to fight with it.” I gripped the short cylinder and held it out in front of me. When I clicked the switch with my thumb, it vibrated with a deep sound and a three-foot blade of purplish-blue energy crackled out of the base. “Ooh,” I murmured. I’d used my fair share of swords, but never one that was made of insubstantial light. Upon further examination, the blade was nondirectional—a narrow, circular cylinder like the handle. I held it out at midlevel and tried the motions for the old SAO One-Handed Sword skill Vertical Square, which was so familiar that I didn’t need the system to give me any help with it. The blade of light growled satisfyingly as it cut a complex path in the air and came to a dead stop. Naturally, I felt no inertial resistance, as the blade weighed essentially nothing. “Wow,” the girl exclaimed with surprise, clapping her hands. “You seem to know what you’re doing. So that was a move from a fantasy world, huh? Maybe you’re tougher than I gave you credit for.” “I’m not that special…This thing sure is light, though.” “Of course it is—that’s about the only thing it has going for it. But assuming

you’re fine with using that as your main weapon, you’ll still want an SMG or a handgun for your sub. You need something to keep folks from getting too close.” “…I see. I suppose you’re right.” “How much do you have left?” I checked my window and found that out of the 300,000 credits I had, only half was left. She blinked in surprise and slumped. “Ugh, those lightswords are so expensive. Only 150K left…Since you’ve got to pay for ammo and armor, too, we might be limited to handguns.” “Um, I’ll leave all the decisions up to you.” “You’ll want a live-ammo gun for the BoB. For keeping people at bay, accuracy might be better than power. Hmm…” She walked slowly past a case of handguns, then pointed to one. “It’ll leave you with very little, but this FN Five-Seven would be good.” Her slender finger pointed out a small automatic pistol with a smooth, rounded grip. “Five…Seven?” “It’s the caliber—5.7 mm. That’s smaller than your average 9 mm Parabellum, but the bullets are shaped like rifle rounds, which gives them an advantage with accuracy and penetration. Because they’re special bullets, you can only share them with the FN P90 submachine gun, but that doesn’t matter if this is the only gun you use.” “Uh, I see…” The explanation flowed out of the pale-haired girl’s mouth so naturally that it made me slightly more curious about her. As GGO had fixed genders, I knew the player herself had to be female, too, but her race and age were beyond me. My instinct told me that her age wasn’t that far from mine. Of course, anyone who played an MMORPG long enough learned about the

items within. Asuna and Leafa could spend minutes and minutes talking about the swords and magic in ALO. But I couldn’t help but feel that something was different about guns. And from what I understood, half of the guns in GGO were actual weapons that existed in the real world. All I could envision after hearing about these weapons was blood and slaughter. This girl around my age dove into this world enough to be a veteran player with detailed knowledge of all kinds of guns. I had to wonder what motivated her to do all of this… “Are you listening?” “Uh, yes, of course.” I snapped back to reality. “I’ll take it, then. What else should I get?” I purchased the Five-Seven handgun she recommended, along with plenty of backup ammunition, a thick bulletproof jacket, a beltlike accessory called an anti-optical defense field generator, along with a few other odds and ends. The 300,000 credits I’d won from the bullet-dodging game were clean gone. The photon sword on my right hip and the Five-Seven on my left tugging with an unfamiliar weight, I walked out of the store to see the sunset had turned a shade redder. “Well, you’ve really been a huge help. Thank you very much,” I said. She grinned behind her muffler and shook her head. “It’s fine. I didn’t have any plans until the prelims begin anyway. Oh!” She stopped and checked the simple chronometer on her left wrist. “Crap, the entry deadline is at three o’clock. We might not make it to the regent’s office unless we sprint…” “Huh? You hadn’t registered yet, either?” “Nope.” Following her pale-faced lead, I checked my brand-new digital watch. The time read 14:51. I looked up and quickly asked, “Are there any means of teleportation or something like that? Items, or spells, or special powers?!”

“I’ll explain as we run!” she shouted, turning around and racing north up the street. I followed the waving muffler. Within a few seconds I had caught up, and she looked over to see that I was close before she continued. “Here in GGO, there’s only one method of instant travel the player can control: dying and returning to the resurrection point. The spawn point in Glocken is close to the regent’s office, but you can’t lose HP in town, so that’s off the table…” We ran at full speed, weaving around the NPCs and players walking the street. It was all I could do to keep up. It was already hard enough to get used to the lower vantage point than what I enjoyed in ALO, but she was also extremely quick. It was the absolute body control of someone who had mastered full-dive movement, not just the effect of good stats. She checked her watch again and pointed down the street. “The regent’s office is over there. It’s at the north end of the market, which is still nearly two miles away. It takes five minutes to register, so we need to get there in three minutes!” Far away down the length of the straight main street was a giant tower glowing red with the light of the setting sun. It was a straight shot there, but even without the worry of cramping up, it would be extremely difficult to cover two miles in three minutes while avoiding pedestrians. If I failed to make it in time for the registry period, that was my own fault for inadequate preparation, but the blue-haired girl running beside me would have easily made it if she hadn’t been sidetracked helping me. I looked over, feeling guilty. She had her teeth gritted and her eyes straight ahead, full of determination. In between virtual breaths, I heard quiet words escaping her lips. “…Please…please, be in time…” The first round of the upcoming Bullet of Bullets tournament had to mean more to this girl than just some game event, I sensed. She had some important reason that compelled her to participate… I looked around the area, searching desperately for some means to get her to